Often, surfaces of substrates do not include desired performance characteristics. The failure to include specific desired performance characteristics can result in surface degradation in certain environments, an inability to meet certain performance requirements, or combinations thereof. For example, in certain environments, metallic, glass, and ceramic surfaces can be subjected to wear and other undesirable surface activities such as chemical adsorption, catalytic activity, corrosive attack, oxidation, by-product accumulation or stiction, and/or other undesirable surface activities.
Undesirable surface activities can cause chemisorption of other molecules, reversible and irreversible physisorption of other molecules, catalytic reactivity with other molecules, attack from foreign species, a molecular breakdown of the surface, physical loss of substrate, or combinations thereof.
To provide certain desired performance characteristics, coatings can be applied to surfaces by various coating deposition techniques to impart better corrosion resistance, improved chemical inertness, better wear resistance, and enhanced anti-stiction properties. Such techniques can include dip coating, spray coating, spin coating, printing, electroplating, and/or physical vapor deposition (PVD). Dip coating, spray coating, spin coating, printing, plating, and PVD can be limited to certain surfaces and/or unable to provide true three-dimensional coating capability. For example, coating of surfaces within tubes can be especially problematic because the coating can build up on the entrance of the tube, the coating can have different thicknesses throughout the tube, and/or the application process may be incapable of applying coating within the tube.
Chemical vapor deposition has been used to produce coatings with improved characteristics by depositing a material at a temperature above the thermal decomposition temperature of the material. However, further improvements are desired.
A surface, article, and process that show one or more improvements in comparison to the prior art would be desirable in the art.